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Today’s class was all about collaborative groups and sharing. We first started as one big group with full attention devoted to one another as we shared where we were at (right now) and shared what topic/issue/concern was really weighing on our minds. This would serve as the foundation upon which we would begin to build our inquiry project for this week. Listening to the journeys that everyone in the class had embarked on was insightful and inspiring not to mention eye opening.

We then went from this big group to smaller group discussion and I landed in an energetic inquiry group that was focusing on creating a website and/or blog for the classroom or the library. Reaching out to the school community via our library website has been on my mind constantly ever since I took on the TL position in my high school. To be quite honest, I don’t think anyone even looks at our website unless we guide/force our students to access databases or selected websites that are linked through the library home page. This needs to change and we are working on it although I am less than certain that the platform we are using (Sharepoint) is really working out for us. The bottom line is that the library website is not an interactive, attractive, collaborative or “go to” place for the majority of those who frequent the space both virtually and physically. My colleagues and I are hoping to change that come the fall.

In September, I will become a classroom teacher in addition to my part time role as a TL. I know that a class website needs to be an essential part of my practice for many reasons: transparency, communication, collaboration, paperless environment and a storage unit for rubrics, information on assignments/projects etc. Again, I believe I would like this website to be a collaborative and interactive “go to” spot but like many of my classmates, I am not entirely sure of how to go about getting it set up.

Our group brainstormed the many website platforms we had heard about or had had experience using: Weebly, Google sites, WordPress, Blogger, Kidsblog and the list could go on. It seems that all these resources could serve us well but how exactly do we set things up? Who has access and how much access? Can every student set up their own blog? The way the site would be used depends very much on the age range of our students. Do we want parents to be able to constantly question or comment on our every move? Can we as teachers make it part of our daily routine to keep the website updated? Should the website be solely informational or should it be an interactive blog where students can comment on others’ work and ask the teacher questions?

In an elementary classroom where the teacher sees the same 24 – 30 students every day we felt that the format of our class blog for this course could work well. We like that the class list of blogs can be easily accessed from our main class blog. In a secondary environment, a teacher has 7 different classes so how could the website be set up to allow for this collaborative and communicative approach within each class? Perhaps a different page for each class could be the answer with links to each student’s blog? The initial set up would be laborious and the management of so many blogs seems daunting.

So many thoughts still…..

I’ve decided that I need to focus on just one, ok…two things after today’s class. For some reason, I was one of those people that just didn’t want to get hooked on Twitter and for many reasons that were mentioned by some of my classmates today. For one, I already feel like I stay super connected with friends, family and people with common interests via Facebook. Did I really need to add another platform to the social media mix? Isn’t Twitter just some ADHD version of Facebook? It seems so short and snappy. Is there any real substance to these tweets? And why do I feel so distracted when I’m trying to listen to and absorb what someone is saying yet there I am trying to tweet out what I’m taking in?

Well, today was only Day 2 of my Twitter life and I’m very slowly beginning to see some of the reasons why I might just one day feel the Twitter love. It started with me wondering what to write on my blog today. Then I thought to myself that a lot of us were actually recording all the goings on of the multiple mini presentations that took place in class today by using this very platform I had been resisting. Twitter was actually kind of useful because I could go back to all the tweets in this course’s hashtag and be reminded of what was talked about, what resources were mentioned and peek at links to articles etc. via my classmates’ tweets. Hey Twitter, you just took notes for me and I didn’t even have to write all of them myself!

Ok, so I said there were two things I was going to focus on for today. Got a little sidetracked with all that Twittering and Tweeting! The presentations in class today were awesome and I thank my colleagues for sharing: for sharing via Twitter, for sharing right up there in front of the class and for sharing via your blogs. You have all made me want to get super organized in an online way for the school year to come and I intend to begin that journey by setting up a classroom website. Michelle Bertrand, I am starting with you. I love that you made yourself transparent and open to suggestions and that you strive to constantly improve on what appears to me to be an amazingly well set up class site/blog. I shall look to you for inspiration and I shall follow you on Twitter. And I hope that I will have the framework for a website that I feel pretty comfy in come the end of this course.

In today’s small group discussion regarding the definition of all the different forms of literacy, our group decided to divide and conquer in our quest to find definitions around the term “literacy” and “technology” and how different school boards and departments of education were dealing with these ever-evolving entities. I chose to focus on finding a suitable and what I hoped to be current definition of “information literacy.” As many of our students do when we send them out to find relevant, reliable, accurate and trustworthy information, I stumbled across this article written in 2004:

http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla70/papers/059e-Campbell.pdf

Sandy Campbell was someone I had never heard of before today. I’m glad that I landed upon this article she published almost 10 years ago. The definition of information literacy she chooses to base her paper on is “the most generally accepted definition of information literacy that one finds in the literature…by the American Library Association in 1989” and is as follows:

“To be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate and use effectively the needed information.”

The question I put to my group and in the discussion forum was whether or not we felt this definition still applied to today and our answer was a resounding yes. In my role as a teacher-librarian and a classroom teacher, I realize more and more that I need to be both the learner and the guide all at the same time as I navigate through the abundance of information available to me and my students online.

The discussion forums in this class are an accurate representation of the above definition of information literacy. We all realize that we need information to explore the various topics we are presented with and then we set off to locate it, quickly evaluate it and then attempt to use it effectively in our classroom and online discussions. For many of us, it is most certainly information overload to accumulate so many links and connections in such a short period of time. We then have to sit back and sift through all that has been strung together and decipher which pieces are most relevant to us and to the particular question we are trying to answer, investigate the authority behind the information, determine whether this information is current and covers our topic. We, as teacher-librarians and educators, must guide our students to critically evaluate the abundance of information they too will stumble upon and equip them with the skills, knowledge and resources to undertake this continuous task.

To choose what resonated the most for me upon reading Will Richardson’s “Why School?” was challenging as I loved so much of what he had to say but…what stands out the most for me is the following:

“I hope schools will be places where learning is fun, where it’s not so much about competing against one another as about working together to solve the really big problems we’ll face together in the years ahead.” (location 555)

I chose this particular passage as I feel that we must focus on a more skills-driven curriculum than a content-driven one and I also strongly believe that many educators in my school district, in this province and in this country are heading in this exact direction. It is imperative that we, the teachers, prove to be exemplary role models in our own learning and guide our students in their own learning paths. We need to guide them in developing the skills necessary to accomplish the tasks that lie ahead.

To assume that our students always know what their passions are is idealistic. We also need to serve as resources in order to open our students’ hearts and minds to worlds they may have never thought to explore had there not been an initial nudge on either our part or  on the part of one of their classmates. The key is that the world in which we are a part of is a collaborative one and we need to embrace this reality and integrate it into our classrooms and daily lives.

In today’s group discussion that centred on an overview of Richardson’s “Why School?” we jumped to several places in the reading and voiced several valid concerns and aspirations. Many of us would love to do away with the summative assessment we are so accustomed to and focus more on formative assessment yet we fear the repercussions from parents, administrators, students and even our own colleagues. How do we prepare our students for entrance into colleges and universities that rely on us to provide a number/letter grade for these institutions to decide on the student’s academic suitability for the field of study applied to?

I will walk away with this discovery today: a TED talk recommended by Kate in my discussion group. It is awesome!

RSA Animate- Changing Education Paradigms
(A You Tube video by Ken Robinson depicting how the world has become diverse but education is not differentiating with the learning needs of our students).